“... for a fourth term – and the more recent official announcement that Avangard had now entered service, drew alarmed and unquestioning attention in the West. ‘Russia Deploys Hypersonic Weapon, Potentially Renewing Arms Race’ the New York Times blared. ‘The new Russian weapon system flies at superfast speeds and can evade traditional missile defence ...”

“... naturally – to Sparta. Its catalogue of model leaders begins with the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, long idolised by McChrystal as a flawed but brilliant military commander, and moves on through a baffling assortment of characters ranging from Walt Disney and Coco Chanel (‘Founders’) to Martin Luther and Martin Luther King ...”

“... Rakosi (another Wisconsiner), Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, John Wheelwright, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert McAlmon, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams and Whittaker Chambers, a friend of Zukofsky’s from Columbia who, among other things, later translated Bambi from the German. Quite a diverse lot, although most of them incorporated key elements of the ...”

“... taking pictures for years at a time. But when he bought a Leica in 1932 he became a purist in its service. He tended to stick to three fixed lenses (35mm, 50mm and 135mm), and was adamant that cropping of any kind was an admission of defeat. In the same year, equipped in this way, he produced two of his most famous photographs: the cyclist caught gliding down ...”

“... popularity with her accession, it could take nothing for granted. It was less than a decade since Robert Peel had predicted that it would not last another five years, and while the violent civil disorder of the early 1830s had abated, there was still considerable ambivalence towards an institution whose incumbents in the two previous reigns had done much to ...”

“... his image, his name and his character – modest, dedicated, optimistic – were recruited in the service of British and American big science, as the inventor of the transformer, the dynamo and the electric motor, those icons of modernity. His reputation survived more than a decade as Margaret Thatcher’s favourite scientist: between 1982 and 1996 Matthew ...”

“... and so many like it was the wartime British naval blockade of Germany. And behind the policy, Lord Robert Cecil, the maverick son of the late Victorian Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury, and minister for blockade in Lloyd George’s wartime government. The aim of the blockade was to damage Germany’s war effort but not Britain’s relations with ...”

“... A senior official told Scahill that Obama was ‘surprised and upset and wanted an explanation’. Robert Gibbs, a senior advisor to Obama, suggested that the boy wouldn’t have been killed if he’d had a ‘more responsible father’. A wrongful death suit against US officials for the death of both al-Awlakis and a third US citizen is pending. Scahill ...”

“... again as a world power. Henry Stimson, Roosevelt’s war secretary, took a different view. So did Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court justice, though Jackson was clear that ‘you must put no man on trial under forms of a judicial proceeding if you are not willing to see him freed if not proven guilty … the world yields no respect for courts that are organised ...”

“... and decided they were suitable as a kind of non-commissioned officer class in the police, postal service and other arms of the state. As a useful if inferior race, they should be protected, unlike the Herero and the Nama. The law, however, followed Trotha’s belief that Africans were subhuman and his almost pathological fear that racial mixing would spread ...”

“... ranks of his own party’s beleaguered moderates, an apostate because of his endorsement of gay service in the military, abortion rights and even the legalisation of marijuana for medical purposes. The New Right had moved way past its founding father. Goldwater was a man before his time, but barely. He was trounced in the 1964 election, going down to one of ...”

“... rule. Vansittart thought that he viewed events ‘with the detachment of a choirboy at a funeral service’. Almost alone among politicians, he was indifferent to what his colleagues, the public or posterity thought of him or his policies. He kept no diary, made no attempt to preserve his papers. His sloth was legendary too. He seldom appeared before 11 ...”

“... artisans, or Dissenters, or women, or colonial subjects aspiring to places in the Indian Civil Service. I don’t remember the Scots or the Welsh or the Irish being mentioned in this catalogue of the excluded. Uncomfortable with any nationalism except its own, this English critique of English still seemed to assume that literature in Britain meant ...”

“... mother, Beth McBride, came from a family of miners and labourers; she escaped from domestic service into the ‘as near as dammit white-collar embrace of Scottish Motor Transport’, as a clippie on the buses. Her father, Eddie Galloway, was a little grander, from a family that ‘could boast a glove-maker, a chauffeur, two cart-drivers and a chap who ...”

“... office, came out so swiftly and in such polished form that the constitutional historian Robert Stevens has speculated that they must have been in preparation before the changes were announced. No doubt there is always an advantage to government in starting a process of consultation and reform with some of the major facts already accomplished; but if ...”